South Africans tend to see 1976 — 50 years ago this year — in parochial terms. It was the year, for example, of the Soweto uprising, when students protested against Afrikaans being the medium of instruction in township high schools. Many historians have seen Soweto ’76 as the beginning of apartheid’s end, though maybe it was the beginning of something we’re still living through.
Less well remembered, but perhaps no less culturally significant, was the arrival of public broadcast television via the South African Broadcasting Corp (SABC). Amid much excitement and buying of Christmas TV sets (bunny aerials, anyone?), programming started on January 5 1976. The night’s viewing was followed by a prayer. There was no television on Sundays.
The National Party government had long tried to stall television’s arrival and South Africa only switched on long after global heavyweights such as Libya (1968), Bolivia (1969) and North Korea (1970). The men in brown suits feared it would bring decadent ideas to South Africans, eroding the body politic with a heady glimpse of life — and flesh — from beyond the country’s heavily policed borders.
It doesn’t matter where ideas come from; they have a valency of their own. Soweto’s students might have been arguing for English as a medium of instruction, but what they were really rioting for was their profound desire to be seen as human. In a word, they wanted to be emancipated from the shit of their everyday lives. In 1976, all forms of liberation were in the air.
The world gets in
Over at the Auckland Park headquarters of the SABC, the government had much to fear. Some of the most popular imported programmes weren’t political in the narrow sense, but they were political in so far as they showed TV viewers the riches of the wider world.
The Bob Newhart Show, featuring the eponymous comedian, introduced audiences to his gorgeously dry, East Coast humour, while Thames Television’s 26-episode The World at War held local audiences spellbound with never-before-seen archival footage. Such events magnified South Africa’s comparative insignificance, forcing viewers to look beyond their apartheid-imposed mental borders. As a child I remember being forbidden from watching The World at War episode on the horrors of Auschwitz and Belsen. Our family didn’t own a TV, but I was told that under no circumstances was I to watch what happened in the gas chambers on the sly at a friend.
Imported programmes weren’t the only SABC fare. Local soap operas, in the form of The Dingleys (set in a Maritzburg bookshop) and The Villagers, were both hugely popular. The Villagers was set on the Village Reef gold mine and featured Gordon Mulholland playing new mine manager Hilton McRae. Buller Wilmot (Brian O’Shaughnessy), the mine’s assistant manager, was passed over for the job McRae was given, packing the script with early spice.
In 1976, South Africa was the world’s largest gold-producing economy, accounting for two-thirds of global output over the decade. A rand was worth $1.15. Without a black character in sight, The Villagers tapped into an environment many South Africans either knew about or had experienced.
Appearance and reality blurred. Unused to recognising actors on the street, viewers confused Mulholland with McRae — the character he was playing. The same fate befell the actor Clive Scott, who was often mistaken for Ted Dixon, the bumbling barman he turned into a character many loved.
South Africa might have been a village in the eyes of a government dedicated to keeping it that way, but by 1976 the illusion was proving difficult to sustain. Never mind The Bob Newhart Show and The World at War, in 1962 Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “global village”. By this logic, South Africa was just a village among many, a small place interconnected by media, and shrinking all the time.
California dreaming
If you were interested in new media in 1976, California was the place to be. More specifically, the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, California, where geeks like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak came to hang out, drink beer and swap code and hardware. Wozniak brought the Apple 1 prototype to computer club get-togethers, and it subsequently became Apple’s first product. It was marketed at Apple by the company’s co-founder, Jobs.
California was flexing its muscle in other respects. To celebrate the American Bicentennial, two wine merchants came up with the idea for a competition between Californian and French wines. It was called “The Judgment of Paris” and was a blind tasting. At the end of the contest, Californian wines came out tops.
Given their pedigree in viticulture (not to mention their very French sense of being French), the judges were outraged. French judge Odette Kahn stormed out of the tasting, demanding her ballot back. She claimed the results were rigged and wrote in disparaging terms about the event in her wine publications. Unlucky Odette. Can I fill your glass with Californian chardonnay?
A violent year
Wine-fuelled conflict aside, the world was a violent, drought-stricken and oil-scarce place in 1976. Kidnappings, aircraft hijackings and mass shootings were commonplace. Bombings by fringe groups, often left-wing, were a feature of European political life. Under a new penal policy initiated by the British government in Northern Ireland, political prisoners were now criminalised.
A serial killer nicknamed “Son of Sam” terrorised several New York boroughs through 1976 and 1977. David Berkowitz, who signed his letters to the newspaper as Son of Sam, murdered six people, causing widespread panic and inspiring the largest manhunt in New York police history. Eventually found and arrested, Berkowitz, a troubled child and an even more troubled adult, pleaded guilty to the murders. In June 1978 he was sentenced to 365 years in prison.
Rising racial tensions were not confined to the outskirts of Joburg. In August 1976, London police and West Indian carnival-goers clashed near Portobello Road during the Notting Hill Carnival. The West Indian community in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove had long been rankled by what they perceived to be heavy-handed local policing. They were outraged by new “stop-and-search” laws which they called arbitrary and discriminatory. Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon of The Clash were involved in the protests. In March the following year, they released White Riot, a song critical of the white working class and police brutality.
The riots took place against the backdrop of the West Indian cricket team’s tour of England. It was a gorgeously hot summer, so hot that it inspired water rationing. The last time the West Indians had won a series in England was in 1966, and they came as one-day world champions, having won the inaugural World Cup at Lord’s the previous year.
As a boy I remember seeing their traditional beginning-of-tour team photograph. It showed them resplendent in whites and maroon blazers with a Caribbean island and a listing palm on the badge. Their cricket was anything but breezy. They bowled fast and hit the ball vast distances.
Viv Richards, the most dynamic batsman in the world at the time, strode to the crease with a kind of haughty imperiousness. He didn’t wear a helmet, goading fast bowlers to come at him with all they had. He scored 291 at the Oval after scoring 232 at Trent Bridge. The West Indies won the Test series 3-1.
Eric Clapton, a self-confessed cricket fanatic, appreciated the series, but this didn’t prevent him airing his anti-immigration politics at a concert in Birmingham. Here he encouraged concertgoers to vote for the far-right Enoch Powell and “keep Britain white”. His comments caused an outrage, but he continued selling huge quantities of records all the same.
Culture breaks loose
Elsewhere in the world, Francis Ford Coppola started shooting Apocalypse Now in the Philippines, a project that was to plunge him into the depths of despair, while Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks wowed the critics. Less artsy folk were entranced by Rocky and The Bad News Bears, while All the President’s Men, featuring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, captured cinemagoers’ imaginations.
Five days after the Soweto students rioted, Barney Simon officially opened the Market Theatre in Joburg with a production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. The fledgling SABC on the other side of Mayfair Hill was already being given a run for its money.
